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‘We’re living in this post-woke fallout and sometimes the artist’s politics are paid more attention to than the actual work. And so you find the artist has to be explicit about politics, otherwise it might not be recognised as such.”
Tiger Maremela and I chatted via Facetime about their (the artist goes by the their/they pronoun) recent exhibition and live performance Soundscapes of a Warzone at the J&B Hive, and browser-based project Where some things are beautiful and everything hurts.
“If you look at [South African artist] Callan Grecia’s work, for example, it’s superpolitical, but isn’t given that space almost because he isn’t doing it on these explicitly ‘woke’ terms. Similarly, none of my work has ever answered questions and I struggle a lot with that because, in my head, it’s just as disorientating and disturbing as how viewing the work feels. I’m just trying to export what’s in my head. Answers are great and we do need them, but, for me, complicating the way we ask questions is part of the solution,” Tiger said.
Although the exhibition and live performance were a once-off, Where some things are beautiful and everything hurts is available online and exists as a virtual archive of multimedia work that has taken Tiger three years of conceptualising to pull together.
You can scroll to the bottom of the page and click on whatever series takes your interest or view the home page like you do your social-media timelines – it’s overwhelming, noisy and resists easy navigation.
After clicking through Where some things are beautiful and everything hurts and attending the live sound performance, you get the sense of the disorientation that Tiger speaks of. Their works shine through the channels and mediums of expression the internet provides us with – as contradictory and overwhelming as this can be.
“Did you save the meme or did the meme save you?” asks one print at the exhibition.
“That was initially a tweet, you know. And the one-night only exhibition was based on the ephemeral nature of the internet – how things get lost online. Instagram stories disappear in 24 hours. Social-media platforms are never static,” they said.
The VR Facebook series What it feels like to live in the internet in Where some things are beautiful and everything hurts caught my attention. Tiger’s earlier work used iconic South African brands (Lion matches and Ultramel, for example) to unpick the colours of the rainbow nation, but, in this work, the products are unmarked, existing despatialised in noisy environments.
“I was interested in product shots – the Timbalands, red heels, red couch – and how these are supposedly ‘universal’ images. Everything is the same, but the naming of the object becomes most important. It’s part of the banality of globalisation: the politics of the thing are more important than the thing itself,” they said.
Understanding banality through repetition is a strong theme running through the work.
Soundscapes of a Warzone came into being because Tiger wanted to highlight everyday acts of violence, and how violation and domination are naturalised in our societies. Microaggressions, harassment, sexual violation – these acts (and more) are part of most people’s daily navigations in South Africa.
“When people think of warzones, they’re not necessarily thinking of South Africa. Somehow, the violence needs to reach a certain level before it’s called that. We pay attention to the violence in this country only every few years.”
Anelisa Dulaze, Karabo Mokoena and Noluvo Swelindawo come to mind. And they aren’t the only people whose deaths have been made into media spectacles.
The use of sound to “break apart the elements of ordinary violence”, as Tiger states, is one of the primary ways they wanted to understand post-apartheid South Africa. In earlier works such as roygbiv, the artist worked solely in digital collage, but with this project, they wanted to broaden the scope of their practice.
“I felt like I was pigeonholed as only a digital collagist and that I could be only this one thing, but with the current project, I wanted to move away from that [collage]. Music and sound is a new avenue for me and I wanted to expand on that in my projects. I wanted to revisit the ideas of the rainbow nation, black masculinity and queerness through photography, written storytelling and virtual reality,” they said.
- See the work at tmaremela.wixsite.com/altf5za
